The Grand Food Bargain

Download or read book The Grand Food Bargain written by Kevin D. Walker and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits. So too does a healthcare system that must absorb rising rates of diabetes and obesity. So too do the workers who must labor harder and faster for less pay. Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. A trip to a Costa Rica plantation shows how the Cavendish banana became the most common fruit in the world and also one of the most vulnerable to disease. Walker’s early career in agribusiness taught him how pressure to sell more and more fertilizer obscured what that growth did to waterways. His family farm illustrates how an unquestioning belief in “free markets” undercut opportunity in his hometown. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential. It starts, Walker argues, with remembering that what we eat affects the wider world. If each of us decides that bigger isn’t always better, we can renegotiate the grand food bargain, one individual decision at a time.

Download or read book The Last Plea Bargain written by Randy Singer and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-02-17 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2013 Christy Award finalist! Plea bargains may grease the rails of justice, but for Jamie Brock, prosecuting criminals is not about cutting deals. In her three years as assistant DA, she’s never plea-bargained a case and vows she never will. But when a powerful defense attorney is indicted for murder and devises a way to bring the entire justice system to a screeching halt, Jamie finds herself at a crossroads. One by one, prisoners begin rejecting deals. Prosecutors are overwhelmed, and felons start walking free on technicalities. To break the logjam and convict her nemesis, Jamie must violate every principle that has guided her young career. But she has little choice. To convict the devil, sometimes you have to cut a deal with one of his demons.

Download or read book Devil's Bargain written by Joshua Green and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump—the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history. Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night. The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world. Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

Download or read book In with the Devil written by James Keene and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis for the Apple TV+ show Black Bird. In with the Devil presents the true story of a young man destined for greatness on the football field—until a few wrong turns led him to a ten-year prison sentence. He was offered an impossible mission: Coax a confession out of a fellow inmate, a serial killer, and walk free. Jimmy Keene grew up outside of Chicago. Although he was the son of a policeman and rubbed shoulders with the city's elite, he ended up on the wrong side of the law and was sentenced to ten years with no chance of parole. Just a few months into his sentence, Keene was approached by the prosecutor who put him behind bars. He had convicted a man named Larry Hall for abducting and killing a fifteen-year-old. Although Hall was suspected of killing nineteen other young women, there was a chance he could still be released on appeal. If Keene could get him to confess to two murders, there would be no doubt about Hall's guilt. In return, Keene would get an unconditional release from prison. But he could also get killed. A story that gained national notoriety, this is Keene's powerful tale of peril, violence, and redemption.

Download or read book Broken Bargain written by Kathleen Day and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of major financial crises--and how taxpayers have been left with the bill In the 1930s, battered and humbled by the Great Depression, the U.S. financial sector struck a grand bargain with the federal government. Bankers gained a safety net in exchange for certain curbs on their freedom: transparency rules, record-keeping and antifraud measures, and fiduciary responsibilities. Despite subsequent periodic changes in these regulations, the underlying bargain played a major role in preserving the stability of the financial markets as well as the larger economy. By the free-market era of the 1980s and 90s, however, Wall Street argued that rules embodied in New Deal-era regulations to protect consumers and ultimately taxpayers were no longer needed--and government agreed. This engaging history documents the country's financial crises, focusing on those of the 1920s, the 1980s, and the 2000s, and reveals how the two more recent crises arose from the neglect of this fundamental bargain, and how taxpayers have been left with the bill.

Download or read book The Man Who Ate the World written by Jay Rayner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's preeminent restaurant critics takes on the giants of haute cuisine, one tasting menu at a time, in this fascinating and riotous look at the business and pleasure of fine dining.

Download or read book Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain written by John Ferejohn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peace, many would agree, is a goal that democratic nations should strive to achieve. But is democracy, in fact, dependent on war to survive? Having spent their celebrated careers exploring this provocative question, John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth trace the surprising ways in which governments have mobilized armies since antiquity, discovering that our modern form of democracy not only evolved in a brutally competitive environment but also quickly disintegrated when the powerful elite no longer needed their citizenry to defend against existential threats. Bringing to vivid life the major battles that shaped our current political landscape, the authors begin with the fierce warrior states of Athens and the Roman Republic. While these experiments in “mixed government” would serve as a basis for the bargain between politics and protection at the heart of modern democracy, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth brilliantly chronicle the generations of bloodshed that it would take for the world’s dominant states to hand over power to the people. In fact, for over a thousand years, even as medieval empires gave way to feudal Europe, the king still ruled. Not even the advancements of gunpowder—which decisively tipped the balance away from the cavalry-dominated militaries and in favor of mass armies—could threaten the reign of monarchs and “landed elites” of yore. The incredibly wealthy, however, were not well equipped to handle the massive labor classes produced by industrialization. As we learn, the Napoleonic Wars stoked genuine, bottom-up nationalism and pulled splintered societies back together as “commoners” stepped up to fight for their freedom. Soon after, Hitler and Stalin perfectly illustrated the military limitations of dictatorships, a style of governance that might be effective for mobilizing an army but not for winning a world war. This was a lesson quickly heeded by the American military, who would begin to reinforce their ranks with minorities in exchange for greater civil liberties at home. Like Francis Fukuyama and Jared Diamond’s most acclaimed works, Forged Through Fire concludes in the modern world, where the “tug of war” between the powerful and the powerless continues to play out in profound ways. Indeed, in the covert battlefields of today, drones have begun to erode the need for manpower, giving politicians even less incentive than before to listen to the demands of their constituency. With American democracy’s flanks now exposed, this urgent examination explores the conditions under which war has promoted one of the most cherished human inventions: a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The result promises to become one of the most important history books to emerge in our time.